For some of you, HTML (hyper-text markup language) is as foreign a language as when you first learned to read and write. This article is for you. For those of us who have been working with HTML for over 10 years, this article will not apply. However, there is a growing number of writers and contributors to content sites that have never spent time with HTML, because their expertise is in writing and editing, and not necessarily formatting articles for online publication.
These days though, if you’re a freelance writer, you are probably being asked to submit your articles through some kind of CMS (content management system), whether it be WordPress, Joomla! or a proprietary content management system. Regardless, they all treat HTML the same and learning a little HTML now can help writers a long way down the road.
Some of the main issues come into play when a writer starts off in Word or another type of word processing tool. When a writer copies text from Word and then pastes it into a CMS, a ton of proprietary MS code is copied along with it. This can mess up the default CSS (cascading style sheet) and formatting for a site. The remedy is to copy from Word, paste into Notepad or another type of plain text editor, and then copy and paste that into the CMS. However, that still does not always do the trick.
In my experience, I have seen all sorts of strange code appearing when a writer submits an article into the Joomla! CMS that I use for my site. Everything from extra <div> tags to <p> tags showing up after each and every line instead of each paragraph and <span> tags that have no purpose in the code other than to fool the default CSS formatting. The extra <div> tags can be especially dangerous because they can alter the appearance of columns and suddenly the bottom footer is appearing in the right-hand column.
Hopefully, this article will help you move past the Rookie mistakes and you can reach the rank of Beginning HTML expert. That will undoubtedly look good on your resume and it’s something you can mention the next time you are looking for new freelance work.
In the majority of CMS’, there is most likely an icon in the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) text editor. You can identify the HTML icon because it probably has a couple of carrots (<>) on it. If you click the HTML editor icon from the text editor, you can see what your article looks like in HTML. From here, you can look for any extra code that was carried over from Word or whatever software you used to write your article. By removing the extra code, and making certain that only clean code is in place, you will be saving your editors and publishers a vast amount of work.
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